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Summer Visit - 2013 - SHIPs

The summer visit to Caltech is 3-4 days long and is the only time during the year of work when all the participants on the team come together in person to work intensively on the data. Generally, each educator may bring up to two students to the summer visit that are paid for by NITARP, and they may raise funds to bring two more. The teams work at Caltech; the summer visit typically includes a half-day tour of JPL, which is a favorite site for group photos. Reload to see a different set of quotes.

The SHIPs team came to visit in June 2013. The core team educators attended, plus 9 students.

Quotes

  • [student:] I was incredibly surprised about how much computer programming I learned. Technology (especially Computer Technology) has never been my strong point but I was able to expand my knowledge and use of Python exponentially. This was completely unexpected for me and I consider it one of my proudest achievements for this trip. It was such an incredible feeling to finally get a program to work after spending a long time concentrating on it. This accomplishment was not easy for me and many times I felt frustrated. However, I then decided to approach programming with a fresh mindset: I started to think of programming as a math game or puzzle. After that, getting a program to work was like winning a game! Many times I jumped for joy after successfully making a program with my peers. I believe that this different attitude helped me gain a new appreciation and enjoyment of programming – something I never expected to happen.
  • [student:] Not only did I gain a great amount of knowledge and experience regarding photometry and computer programming, but I met some great people as well. Everyone there was eager to learn, to teach and to have fun. All of the teachers are great people and were very supportive, and the kids who went are now new friends of mine, and I am very excited to see them all again in January.
  • [student:] The most interesting thing for me on this trip was that we were able to work with real astronomers who were doing the same research that we were.
  • [student:] I gain[ed] a whole new level of respect for each person I worked with because we were all treated as equals.
  • [student:] Before this trip I thought that everyone in this field had similar jobs, and they were all related to research. Now I've realized that there are so many different jobs that go into NASA. Learning the computer and research aspects of astronomy while seeing the engineering and construction aspects at JPL really opened my eyes to all the different job opportunities in this field.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2013 - SHIPs